Following is the best cartoon I have ever seen. Excuse the low quality, because it is a scan of an old and precious magazine clipping.
You could write a doctoral dissertation on how these four panels work their magic and represent the art and mechanics of humor. Or you could just laugh.
If you had a round trip ticket
To heaven or hell,
Bliss or madness,
Sure you would return,
Would have to,
Which would you choose?
Tour over,
Now the common surroundings
Might seem shabby and disappointing or
Simple comfort and sanity a relief.
Conscripted for travel
Or volunteering,
This is what you learned
Gladly or sadly
For the next inevitable journey.
Not many people had heard of the artist Shepard Fairey (“Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989”) until he created the Obama “Hope” poster, one of the most famous pieces of art in modern American politics.
Since then, he has been spending his time creating, exhibiting and selling all sorts of provocative and eminently viewable art/propaganda on the beneficial edge of society, politics and culture.
He created the poster above for today’s Bernie Sanders benefit concert in Los Angeles. For those who haven’t looked for a while, or don’t know Shepard’s work, here is a sampling:
I posted one of my favorite jokes more than two years ago. Because I thought we all needed a laugh. In case you weren’t around, here it is again. Because we definitely need a laugh.
Duck walks into a drugstore, asks for some Chap Stick. Guy behind the counter says, “That’ll be fifty-nine cents.” Duck says, “Put it on my bill.”
Next day, the duck walks into the drugstore, asks for a package of condoms. Guy behind the counter says, “Would you like me to put that on your bill?” Duck says, “Hey, what kind of a duck do you think I am?”
Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), is a currently infamous architect of political change, demonized but also mostly unread.
His infamy comes from the revelation that Barack Obama had used Alinsky’s work as a sourcebook for community organizing back in Chicago. That was enough for conservative Obama haters, who took this as just one more sign of Obama’s anti-Americanism. Most of them had never read Alinsky, but were sure he was some sort of scary Commie/enemy of the state type, who in the right kind of America belonged in jail—if he hadn’t already been dead.
Rules for Radicals is none of that. It is instead an articulate and sensible outline for making political change—not by rejecting or blowing up the system or the establishment, but by first accepting the way things and people are and working from there.
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
Anything else, Alinsky says, alienates people by going outside their experience. Which is why, for example, he was so opposed to the tactic of burning the American flag as a form of protest.
This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience — and gives full respect to the other’s values — would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America’s hopes and aspirations, and he would have conveyed this message to his audience.
Alinsky cites many political thinkers, giving special attention to the virtues and vices of those behind the American Revolution. Sam Adams, for example, made the case for revolution against the British, but once he was part of the established new regime, opposed rebellions within the new American democracy. This, Alinsky says, is a typical pattern.
Writing in 1971, after decades as an organizer, Alinsky hoped to guide a new generation of young radicals who seemed passionate but relatively rudderless. He laid out the practical lessons of his experience, especially the distinction between the rhetorical radical and the pragmatic radical.
This is the promise and the danger of what Alinsky saw at the time, and in a certain light, might still see today:
The “silent majority,” now, are hurt, bitter, suspicious, feeling rejected and at bay. This sick condition in many ways is as explosive as the current race crisis. Their fears and frustrations at their helplessness are mounting to a point of a political paranoia which can demonize people to turn to the law of survival in the narrowest sense. These emotions can go either to the far right of totalitarianism or forward to Act II of the American Revolution.
Babel On
What is the point and price of
The tower of words and thoughts?
High and fine
To reach higher and finer.
Was God protective,
Jealous even,
Of the secret word
That would reveal all
And make him redundant,
Obsolete, inferior?
Or was it a sign
We couldn’t read
That in the clouds,
On the moon,
Mars, the stars
We would find nothing but ourselves
Still babbling
Traveling
Going nowhere?
Hillary Clinton: Magic mirror on the wall, who won the Iowa caucus?
Magic Mirror: Over the seven jeweled hills, beyond the seventh fall, in New Hampshire campaigns Bernie Sanders, the winner in Iowa.
Hillary Clinton: I won Iowa. Bernie Sanders is dead. Behold the results.
Magic Mirror: Bernie Sanders still lives. You failed to vanquish him.
Hillary Clinton: Then I’ve been tricked.
With sincere apologies to Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, and Webb Smith, the writers of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). And to the Brothers Grimm.
Chicago reported the most January homicides since 2000. This is a symptom and not just in Chicago. A number of American cities are seeing similar increases.
This is a symptom of a socio-economic underclass with little hope of moving up on any significant scale. And now for the first time in the post-World War 2 era, we have a socio-economic middle class also seeing and believing that upward movement is beyond expectations and aspirations. This is expressed in the current level of nonpartisan political dissatisfaction.
These symptoms require hard and unsparing self-awareness as a nation. Whatever the underlying conditions are, the treatments being prescribed have not worked. It is dangerous folly to think that just because a person has been relatively healthy over a pretty long time, with the occasional ups and downs, the standard remedies are bound to work for any conditions. Not to mention that some treatments once lauded turned out to be ignorant and deadly. Consider that bloodletting—cutting blood vessels or attaching leeches to extract the disease—was once the height of medicine (and why barber poles are striped red and white).
According to some experts, there is a tiny chance we may fall back into a 2008-style recession. There is also a chance that in some cities we might see a summer of 2016 that looks a little like the hot summers of the 1960s. However small those chances are, we might not want to be waiting around to see if these and other symptoms go away on their own. Sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t.
Approximately Analog Time
The digital clock is too precise
Four numbers and two dots.
What does it tell me?
What if it’s wrong?
Better the circle
Studded with the dozen
Swept by two lines,
Leaving a little to the imagination,
Not subject to the rule
Of the atomic heartbeat.
Best is the unadorned circle,
Just two hands pointing
Roughly and unevenly
To an approximation.
Admitting that it knows a little
But not much.
